Finland makes broadband a 'legal right' | Hacker News Reader

Finland makes broadband a 'legal right'

news.bbc.co.uk

30 pointsxaverius41 comments

Great intentions - completely wrong way to make it happen.

Regulating the broadband internet market will just make people in metropolitan areas subsidize the cost for people in rural areas. If it ended there...sure it wouldn't be fair, but at least it would be a zero sum game (some win, some equally lose). But with regulation that's never the case because:

1. you introduce additional costs for government oversight

2. you discourage new entrants to the market, thereby reducing competition

As Milton Friedman said, you can never judge a government program by it's intentions, only the results it gets.

Free markets and unbridled competition have a much better track record of driving prices down, making new technologies available to the masses.

Cost of flat panel TV's (unregulated) have cut in half every 18 months since they came out. What was once a toy for the rich is now available even to poor people.

Cost of health care (regulated, and increasingly a technology product) has steadily increased each year.

post hoc ergo propter hoc

Well, in this case we are beginning to treat broadband as a need for a person, so you can think of it as a market similar to the electricity or water market, where regulation makes perfect sense, and it actually favors competition by preventing "price abuse" from big established companies.

Free markets and unbridled competition have a much better track record of driving prices down, making new technologies available to the masses.

In industries with a high barrier to entry, the market naturally tends away from competition. Broadband is one such industry, due to the enormous initial infrastructure costs.

I don't think so, if you look at the united states the broadband industry is heavily regulated.

That's partly because it's nearly impossible to build a telecommunications network in the private sector, due to the fact that you don't have eminent domain power, can't dig up roads, etc. And if we're going to have the government assisting private businesses, granting them local monopolies, etc., then sure, they should be regulated.

I never said the US broadband industry isn't regulated, I was just correcting an economic misconception of his. It is entirely true that if the broadband industry were left completely unregulated, there would be a few dominant players in the industry, and their dominance would be a result of the high barriers to entry, and not because of their inherent superiority.

I disagree. People would join voluntary local cooperative that can better deals with network providers. They can take a loan out to build the last mile and then just pay to connect to a bigger hub and then even have ability to switch.

Condo home owner associations get better deals for a lot of things than the individual could.

One might think that a city is just one big cooperative, but of course, its not really voluntary at all (except that you decide to live there) and is usually not as transparent or as responsive as a cooperative that forms without any coercion.

There's a certain point where increasing size of a group causes more overhead managing the size of the group (otherwise know as "politics and corruption" than it gets you in buying power.

Of course, such things can't really happen once a provider convinces a municipality to to make it a regulated monopoly. Once it is a monopoly, it can devote itself perpetually to reducing this regulation instead of improving its service, as incentives to do so are greatly reduced.

> In industries with a high barrier to entry, the market naturally tends away from competition. Broadband is one such industry, due to the enormous initial infrastructure costs.

Maybe things are different where you live, but the bandwidth / price ratio has increased over 400% in the past 4 years for me where I live. Not a single website was blocked because the greedy corporation didn't want me to see it. Perhaps a few people were able to pay extra to video-conference, watch HDTV on demand, or do remote-surgery because my torrent downloads were throttled imperceptibly, but I think that's probably a good thing.

What is your point? From your post, I'm going to assume you live in the US. If so, you should know that your broadband access is the result of heavy government regulation.

I'm curious why you would make that analogy. Differences between the TV and health care markets aside, last time I checked, the US has perhaps both the least-regulated and most expensive health care system in the industrialized world.

I don't think you know how regulated health care is in the US. For instance, for all the talk about insurance companies being for profit, most don't realize that a lot were nonprofit until the government made that illegal.

Health care is a labor intensive good. Labor is more expensive in the US than in most other parts of the world, particularly high skilled labor. A haircut or a yoga lesson also costs more in the US than in most other countries for this same reason.

Further, the US healthcare market has more regulations than you think. One example: in most of the world, you buy birth control pills at the store for cheap. In the US, you must first pay a doctor for permission.

Health care is dramatically less expensive in nearby Canada. Moreover, health care costs are increasing in the USA faster than any other country.

It is true that some US regulations do drive up costs -- you mentioned one. There are lots of other perverse incentives in the US system, because there are so many powerful players looking out for their own interests -- HMOs, hospital networks, drug manufacturers, politicians.

I would hate to see the usual libertarian/socialist debate ensue here on HN. I would like to challenge people who participate in this thread to not react reflexively, but go look up the actual data and understand what you're debating.

In the USA, many people who criticize single-payer health care don't have the first clue about it. They believe it's more expensive than the USA, there's more bureaucracy and paperwork, that there's less choice of doctors... all of which are false. False, as in not true. It doesn't matter what Milton Friedman says the world is supposed to be like. Or if you have to have a theoretical foundation before you'll believe data, go check out the foundational paper in health economics, "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care", by Kenneth Arrow.

That said, back to the original post, which is about broadband regulation -- again, I urge people to go look at what happens in other countries, or indeed what happened in the USA in earlier times, when economic policies were based on data and the overall good of the country, instead of ideology.

I'm not sure if I would have classified broadband as a "right" (it seems to cheapen other rights, IMO). But faced with industries that often create natural monopolies or oligopolies (telecom is the textbook example) regulation with the goal of universal service can have good effects.

Health care is dramatically less expensive in nearby Canada.

High skill labor is dramatically less expensive in nearby Canada. A 99'th percentile individual costs $181k/year in Canada and $384k/year in the US.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2007109/article/409688...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html

The 95'th percentiles are more or less the same between the US and canada ($154k in Canada, $165 in the US), but things just diverge dramatically after that point. The average over the top 5% works out to be $296,000 in Canada and $416,000 in the US.

Why would you expect health care costs to behave differently from other high skill jobs?

By the way, the most important paper in health care economics is "The Effect of Coinsurance on the Health of Adults" (http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2006/R3055.pdf). Everyone ignores it because the conclusion is counterintuitive, but it is bar none the highest quality study ever performed on health care economics.

> In the USA, many people who criticize single-payer health care don't have the first clue about it.

Actually, many do.

About half the US population gets its healthcare via some US govt. (FWIW, The VA was just found to have given HIV to about 1800 people.) It isn't any cheaper or more effective than the private system(s).

If the US govt is capable of delivering healthcare effectively, why isn't it?

That's why I wanted to give Obama a free hand wrt the folks that US govts already serve, with no increase in per-capita budget. And, since govt health care is supposed to be cheaper, the per-capita budget goes down 5%/year for years 3-6 (which is a bit over 20%). The savings can be spent on covering additional people or other programs.

For some reason, Obamacare advocates don't like that proposal.

Here's my take. If you don't think that the next generation is going to pay your social security, what makes you think that it's going to pay your healthcare? That said, I appreciate that you're volunteering to pay mine.

> the US has perhaps both the least-regulated

It is difficult to argue about this because there's no good unit of measurement for regulations.

But I would look at practitioner licensing, drug availability, tort law, and insurance requirements. My impression is that the USA is highly regulated (and more importantly, poorly regulated) in those areas.

> As Milton Friedman said, you can never judge a government program by it's intentions, only the results it gets.

The results, as far as I can tell, are that Scandinavian countries have very good publicly owned infrastructure.

And they have it before the law comes into effect.

I'm talking about much more infrastructure than just broadband. They have good public health-care systems, public transportation systems, etc. --- not just good intentions, but good results. What reason is there to believe that they won't do public broadband just as well?

> I'm talking about much more infrastructure than just broadband. They have good public health-care systems, public transportation systems, etc. --- not just good intentions, but good results. What reason is there to believe that they won't do public broadband just as well?

Taken as a whole, they are considerably poorer on average than US citizens (especially professionals of the calibre seen on HN). I'm not convinced, based on their self-reported claims of excellence, that their policies, if emulated, would make the USA more prosperous or more pleasant to live for the average person. I think this is doubly true for the intelligent and motivated.

I think you over-estimate how well the 'average' person in the USA is living today.

I have no illusions about how much 'average' in the USA is, but I also have no illusions about how much 'average' is in Scandinavian counties are, either. Commodity prices are somewhat higher there, which when adjusted against their income actually makes them somewhat poorer than US citizens, kind of like how $50k in New York City won't get you as far as $50k in Seattle.

That's plausible, though there are a lot of factors and some subjectivities. Most retail goods cost more, but you also get some miscellaneous stuff free or heavily subsidized. For example, in Denmark, it's easier to get around without a car, you don't have to pay for health insurance, the state provides some degree of free child care, etc., all of which adds up to a decent amount of savings, especially for poorer people (for whom those things tend to account for a larger proportion of their budget). I think Scandinavia definitely wins on the lower-class end: a 25th-percentile-income family in Denmark, is probably much better off than a 25th-percentile-income family in the US. I'm not sure what the comparison would come out as at the 50th percentile. It might depend on where exactly in Scandinavia and the U.S. you are, and answers to some lifestyle-preference questions (for example, do you actively prefer having a car, or do you actively prefer being able to get away without having a car?). At the top end, the U.S. diverges increasingly above.

Except, in Denmark, telephony companies, public transport etc. has traditionally been state-owned companies. Recently that–somewhat–changed, though.

It's nice to see some governments recognizing that something which was once a luxury is now becoming a necessity as offline alternative for mandatory services (paying bills, job searching, etc) get stripped down or removed entirely.

A car used to be a luxury, now it's a necessity.

Do you think owning a car is a legal right?

That must really depend on where you live. I don't own a road registered car, and feel no ill effects because of it.

Irrespective of whether you believe governments should play a role, this is the wrong comparison to make. Governments don't provide the cars, they provide the roads.

Similarly Finland's government isn't proposing giving everyone computers - they want to make sure everyone has access to the infrastructure.

You're right. I understand and agree with your point.

Thanks

This is also important in Australia where the population is mostly clumped in cities along the coasts. Without similar thinking, broadband in "the bush" would simply be unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

I'm sure Finland like Sweden has public transportation going virtually everywhere already. A car isn't a necessity, transportation is.

I live in Portland, so I'm questioning your premise off the bat. :) I'd say freedom of movement and the ability to reasonably exercise that freedom is the right, which governments legally support by creating/maintaining/policing the roads.

This really implies other rights for the requirements to access the broadband connection. Shelter, electricity, computer, etc, would all be needed for someone to realize this legal right. Will these also be provided by Finland to its citizens?

Not necessarily related to this article, but doesn't Finland also require every citizen to enlist in their military for a few years?

I remember reading about it in some Linus Torvalds interview, seems like an interesting policy.

In Finland, all men are subject to a mandatory service. Women can join in voluntarily but the numbers have been really low number, to no surprise.

The service can either be military training (at least 6 months) or civil service (pacifist option but it's twice as long, which is criticized internationally by Amnesty). About ten percent of young men are dismissed each year: some for a real reason (medical, psychological, other), some for "other" reasons.

While officially never admitted, the system is heavily geared towards re-enacting Finland's WW2, that is, defence against Russia, Finland's eastern neighbour. It's a collective wartime trauma in constant replay.

It's an archair system that will turn into something more modern in a couple of generations or the coming decades, if not for anything else then for the lack of funding.

If they just stopped censoring the internet as well, too, we could be talking about something likening a "right".

Why was this downmodded? There's active internet censorship in Finland, see http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2008-02-18.html or google for more information.

I think it brings a quite striking contrast to the way the "internet rights" were bragged about in the news.

Interesting. I wonder if every Finn has the right to food, clothing and shelter.

Yes. Finns who cannot afford the above get government support that is equivalent to an estimated minimal reasonable cost for such expenses.

I keep telling people it's my legal right to have a spaceship, but noone seems to believe me. :(

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